News Briefs
News Briefs
AHRQ releases Nationwide Inpatient Sample
The U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has released the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) — the most current publicly available national database of hospital inpatient care use, outcomes, and charges on all patients, regardless of payment source. This newest NIS release includes hospital discharge information from approximately 7 million inpatient stays at more than 1,000 hospitals in 22 states.
"Increasingly, the health services research community is using the NIS to uncover trends that have significant public policy and management implications for inpatient care," says AHRQ director John M. Eisenberg, MD. "This data set gives researchers an evidence base to understand patterns of hospitalization by Americans as a whole, or by specific groups such as children and the elderly, and to assess outcomes as well as hospital charges."
The NIS is the only publicly available database that includes charge information from all payers, including Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers. There are also data on the uninsured included.
As with previous releases, the 1997 NIS contains more than 100 clinical and nonclinical variables including: principal and secondary diagnoses and procedures; patient demographic characteristics such as gender, race, median income; payment source; length of stay; total charges; and discharge status.
The large size of the database permits analysis of rare conditions such as congenital anomalies, and studies of infrequent procedures such as organ transplantation. For researchers who want to analyze trends, NIS data sets are available for 1988 through 1997.
The NIS can be linked with databases containing county-level information, such as the Bureau of Health Professions Area Resource File — a database of the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration. It also can be linked with descriptive hospital data from the Ameri-can Hospital Association’s Annual Survey of Hospitals.
The data set can be run on desktop computers and comes in ASCII format for ease of use with numerous off-the-shelf products, including SAS and SPSS. NIS also includes weights for producing national and regional estimates and comes with full documentation in Adobe Acrobat. SAS and SPSS users are provided programs for converting ASCII files.
NIS is part of a family of products produced by the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), a federal-state-industry partnership sponsored by AHRQ.
Information on trends will be released later in the year. Look for a story in an upcoming issue of Healthcare Benchmarks that outlines the major changes from the last NIS.
The 1997 NIS is available on CD-ROM with accompanying documentation for $160 from the National Technical Information Service, 5285 Port Royal Road, Springfield, VA, 22161. Telephone: (800) 553-6847 or (703) 605-6000.
Interested users can preview the NIS on-line with HCUPnet at http://www.ahrq.gov/data/ hcup/hcupnet/htm.
New benchmark is the largest of its kind
QCSI, Microsoft, and Compaq have created the largest published health care benchmark designed to create a cost-effective and flexible program for large commercial health care plans. The new program uses the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system, Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, and Compaq’s ProLiant hardware.
The makers claim the new program, QMACS, can reduce cost per claim and the time needed to process claims significantly. Tests of the program used data from a large health insurance plan and combined information from the plan’s commercial health maintenance organization and Medicaid lines of business.
According to consultants who reviewed the tests of the benchmark data, the results surpassed industry norms and could allow organizations to reduce daily processing times by a minimum of 18%.
The primary design criteria for the tests were data volume and complexity and included 9 million members, 16.5 million claims, more than 25,000 employer groups, more than 1,000 unique benefit packages, and 62,000 providers.
Test highlights include:
• In one hour, the n-tier QMACS enterprise architecture processed more than 3.7 million health care transactions.
• Cost per transaction was about a .001 cents.
• About 33,800 claims were processed per hour.
The complete set of test results can be found at these Web sites:
• http://www.qmacs.com/
• http://www.microsoft.com/industry/ health/
• http://www.compaq.com/products/ servers/benchmarks/index.html
• http://www.synertechsystems.com/
New book helps with best practice in home care
Is your home care agency looking for assistance in developing its social work practice? A new book, Social Work Practice in Home Health Care, from the Haworth Press of Binghamton, NY, can help you determine best practices, give you assistance in finding benchmarking partners, and even provide sample documents and case studies for comparison.
The book’s author, Ruth Ann Goode, PhD, a home health consultant from Cuyshaga Falls, OH, includes chapters on patient care policies, staffing models, and Medicare standards.
Social Work Practice in Home Health Care is available for $24.95 from the publisher by calling (800) 429-6784, or by going to the company Web site at http://www.haworthpressinc.com.
IPRO launches new Web site
IPRO, the New York-based health quality evaluation organization, has retooled its Web site (www.ipro.org) to provide better access to its publications and products.
New features of the site include:
• a directory of services for consumers, business, governmental entities, health care providers, and health plans;
• the group’s Medicare quality improvement studies, which are done in collaboration with providers throughout New York state;
• text and graphics for the 1999 New York State HMO Report Card;
• an on-line version of IPRO’s Medicare Rights Guide and other consumer publications;
• full text of the technical report on the group’s performance audit of Medicare HMOs, done under contract with the Health Care Financing Administration;
• newsletters for providers;
• on-line versions of IPRO’s consumer brochures on mammography, immunization, and other health topics;
• direct links to tools like IPRO’s pneumonia management program.
JCAHO offers new manual for hospitals
The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations in Oakbrook Terrace, IL, has three new publications to help hospitals get through their surveys.
The Comprehensive Accreditation Manual for Hospitals: The Official Handbook, the Automated Comprehensive Accreditation Manual for Hospitals, and the 2000 Subscription Update Service can help give administrators the tools they need to get through their surveys successfully.
The manual was updated, and includes an explanation of the accreditation process and scoring, a description of the standards, and new standards for this year, including the most current sentinel event policy and accreditation watch information.
The automated version provides the same information in an electronic format and allows organizations to incorporate HTML in their intranets. Users can also search by words or phrases. The table of contents is always visible, and hyperlinks make corresponding information easily accessible.
The electronic manual can be purchased as a single license or a site license. Those organizations that purchased the 1999 version can receive the next version by purchasing an update to the existing license.
To remain current with Joint Commission policies and standards throughout the year 2000, the Joint Commission offers the 2000 Subscription Update Service. This service provides quarterly updates to the Comprehensive Accreditation Manual for Hospitals: The Official Handbook.
The service provides hospitals with standards and intent changes, performance measurement requirements, revised policies and procedures, and scoring changes, as well as new examples of compliance.
For more information or to order any of these publications, call the Joint Commission customer service center at (630) 792-5800, between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m., Central time, Monday through Friday.
APQC offers health care a passport to success
Organizations can now set their course for success with Knowledge Management, the first of several books to be released as part of the American Productivity & Quality Center’s (APQC’s) Passport to Success series. The book includes examples of best practices and tips from professionals. It’s available through APQC’s on-line bookstore at www.store.apqc.org. The price is $17.95 for members of APQC’s International Benchmarking Clearinghouse and $19.95 for nonmembers.
Hospitals can access medical encyclopedia
A partnership between adam.com, a medical information Web site based in Atlanta and MedSeek, a developer of Web sites and services for health care in Solvang, CA, will bring adam.com’s medical encyclopedia to many medical professionals. The proprietary library contains more than 10,000 pages of medical and health content covering more than 1,500 topics, and includes medical illustrations, interactive animations, 3-D models, broadcast-quality video, and fully dissectible male and female bodies. The encyclopedia’s content and products are used in the education, broadcast, legal, and print publishing markets.
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